Still Keeping Public In The Dark About Sandy Hook

EditorialThe Hartford Courant

The lead investigator continues to cheat the public when it comes to releasing information about shootings that took the lives of 20 children and six women at the Sandy Hook Elementary School last December.

A report on the criminal investigation should have been completed and released to the public long ago. Delay only heightens suspicions that something might have been amiss in the response to the shootings by public safety and criminal justice officials.

Even Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has been complaining, and rightly so, about the foot-dragging of the lead investigator, Danbury State's Attorney Stephen J. Sedensky III.

According to Courant sources, Mr. Sedensky next week will release only a summary of the long-awaited state police report on the horrific shootings. The date for release of the full report, said to run thousands of pages, has apparently not yet been determined.

The investigative summary will be released almost a year after the first-graders and educators were shot to death at their Newtown school. There's no good reason why it has taken this long for the prosecutors and police to prepare the report.

Further, the summary, according to sources, will be heavily redacted — censored, with much detail blacked out.

This grudging, minor concession to the requirements of open government — the people's right to know — is consistent with Mr. Sedensky's and the police's behavior all along.

Mr. Sedensky first said the report would be ready in June, then September, missing that deadline too.

During the past 11 months, state police officials have told audiences at police conventions some of the details of the crime and the background of the shooter, Adam Lanza, that they wouldn't share with the people of Connecticut.

Nor will police authorities and the prosecutors honor requests for 911 calls made from Sandy Hook school, information that is generally made public in this state.

At the behest of prosecutors, a law was negotiated in secret and passed by the legislature at the end of this year's session that puts the clamps on the release of much information covering not just Sandy Hook but all homicides.

Now the investigators tender only a censored summary of their investigative work.

Prosecutors and police have worked cooperatively and sensitively with the families of the Sandy Hook victims.